


promise

by spiritscript



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Confessions, Getting Together, Idiots in Love, M/M, Pining, it's just soft there's nothing else to tag it with okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiritscript/pseuds/spiritscript
Summary: Miya Osamu knows two things for definite above all else in his life. They are the two infallible constants that he could not alter, no matter how much he may want to try. Not that he does. He never would.Miya Osamu is in love with his best friend, Suna Rintarou.Osamu makes a promise, Suna makes sure he keeps it
Relationships: Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Comments: 30
Kudos: 131
Collections: SunaOsa





	promise

**Author's Note:**

> rip to all my other wips but this one is different because this one possessed me last night and made me write it and i actually finished

Miya Osamu knows two things for definite above all else in his life. They are the two infallible constants that he could not alter, no matter how much he may want to try. Not that he does. He never would.

One of them is simple. He wants to work in the culinary sector. More accurately, he wishes to one day own his own kitchen in which he will hang the old, yellowing photograph of his grandmother shaping onigiri in her small, quaint kitchen. In this photo, her mouth is slightly open but smiling, eyes crinkling, as she says what would have sounded like nonsense to a seven month old Miya Osamu who can be seen sitting on the counter beside the bowl of rice. He looks up at her with eternal awe etched in his smooth skin. Osamu doesn’t think that awe ever left. It's etched no longer on his face but on his fingertips, in the lines of his fingerprints that define him as different to his twin, Atsumu, whose fingers are etched with volleyball. 

This is a truth that he has come to accept even if it wasn’t always easy.

The second is complicated. The second is a ball of yarn that, should he start pulling, may unravel or wrap around itself tighter and create a knot that would take years to unpick. Maybe he’d give up and cut it off. Or leave it there to see as a failure of himself and his feelings.

The second has come to hit him, a swipe with a brick straight to the temple and he’s reeling, as he lies in the dark of a room surrounded by friends, team mates, with the stench of victory and the high of possibility, staring at the mess of hair sticking at odd angles on the pillow in front of him. He doesn’t know if he can really make it out in the dark room, or if he has come to be able to envision it easily from extensive exposure. The only light in the room is the yellow spilling from a street lamp and creeping under the curtain, and crawling toward them, but only just. As has the realisation while he looks at the back of a head that is too familiar because he has stared at it on and off the court, in classrooms and on streets and he’d never realised how much he had come to look at it. Maybe because, if he looked him in the eyes more, he subconsciously knew that it would hit him sooner and he’d have to decide how to deal with that thread in a time when he was not yet ready. But now that he has stupidly caught himself and said _‘tag, you’re it’,_ it cannot be unknown.

Miya Osamu is in love with his best friend, Suna Rintarou.

Despite the monumental realisation that this is, it doesn’t feel weird. Because for every moment he has spent watching him quietly, he has spent just as many looking, really looking at him. He has seen the ways Rintarou’s eyes light up every single time, without fail, when Osamu pulls a chuupet from his pocket, or the freezer, or the plastic bag from the konbini by his house. Osamu has seen the way he changes from quiet and calculating and observing, to bright and loud and animated, his hands waving, fumbling over himself to pull out videos when he talks of his little sister. Or the way he always puts his pens behind his ear and forgets. Or how he will watch his phone as you talk at him, but his entire focus will he pin pricked on you. How even the most miniscule of differences in someone’s behaviour has him asking someone else if there’s something wrong—he won’t ask the person himself though, he’ll outsource the issue. (It used to be Kita, now it’s usually Gin). Or the way, in quiet moments, he’ll pull out one of his endless stupid facts, or a small, wrapped candy and place it on someone’s head. Usually Osamu’s. 

And really, Osamu knows he should have known sooner. He should have been able to tell by the ache like a scalpel across bones, that squeezed his chest every time Rintarou did these things, how his breath would catch as Rintarou lay his head on Osamu’s shoulder, the way a simple brush of their thighs made Osamu want to scream, scream, scream, something, something, something, and he was always such a fool not to know that while food is etched in the lines of his fingerprints, Rintarou is etched in the chambers of his heart.

“I think,” he whispers and pauses, testing the waters, the air, tugging lightly on that string for some hint of what it may choose to do, “I—this is so sappy.” He pulls one of his hands out from under his pillow and digs the heel of it into his eyes hard enough he sees stars, then he turns back and tries again.

“I love you,” he swallows and waits, not expecting an answer, and not getting one. “I think I have for a while. I love you. But I’m not going to tell you that—at least not awake and to your face. I don’t think I can. I don’t think I could… do that.”

What he wants to say is he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to lay his heart bare to him and hand Rintarou his favourite carving knife and tell him to do what he wants. He doesn’t know how to though, he doesn’t have the words, nor the poetics.

Instead he stops. He listens a little longer as his heart knocks at his chest to be let out, to be let have control, to reach over and touch Rintarou. He doesn’t.

“I love you. I’ll tell you one day… The day I open the first Onigiri Miya, I’ll tell you. Because I know I’ll still love you then. I promise.”

He turns around, closes his eyes, and tries to sleep. 

Suna Rintarou was made a promise by a boy in the dark, who didn’t know he was wide awake and listening to the soft patter of his words falling among the gentle snores of their friends, and the sweet smell of adrenaline and anxiety, a little over three years ago.

Rintarou didn’t forget. Couldn’t forget if he tried. Never wanted to if he was being honest. Veridical to a fault, he would say that he’s waited for this day for a little over three years.

_Three years, two months—give or take a couple of weeks._

Add to that a couple of hours. He’s late.

Suna Rintarou has been in love with his best friend for longer than he knows, so he could never hold Osamu’s hesitancy against him, Rintarou was far more the coward. 

Sometimes, he wonders when it started, when something heavier than cordiality began to seep into him through small words and touches from Osamu. If it was the time he accidentally ate a mouthful of paper in his excitement to eat. If it was when Rintarou found out he mumbles in his sleep on the way home from a training camp. 

Or if it was tiny fragments falling into a mosaic, or a pointillistic painting that couldn’t be seen or understood until the final piece was in place and the whole picture was laid in front of him. 

He thinks that the moment of true revelation came a year before the promise. Standing in Rintarou’s kitchen, Osamu held a knife that he had brought from home because it was his favourite, and he was chopping an onion when he hesitated and turned to Rintarou who always was in awe of how agile his fingers were. Then he said simply, _‘Rin, this is what I want to do.’_ Rintarou didn’t answer as Osamu began scraping the vegetable into the awaiting wok with a sizzle, the kitchen filling up with the smell instantaneously.

That’s when he said it.

_‘I don’t want to do volleyball. I wanna cook.’_

Rintarou looked at his face that always read as open to him, even when others said he wasn’t as easy to read as his brother, Rintarou always just smiled and shook his head. Osamu was always so easy to read. It only took that look for the weight of the whole situation to crash and then settle, Rintarou was the first to know. That was when it clicked.

Rintarou would never admit it, but he is a coward—under the right circumstances. He was a coward then. And he was until that ability was cut from him and Osamu whispered, _I love you. But I’m not going to tell you that._ And then a condition; _I’ll tell you one day…_

Opening the restaurant door, he’s greeted with the smell of home cooking and the soft drone of voices around him. He doesn’t hear any of that. In his head, soft words are spoken over and over, that should have shattered him, but served as something else—a goal. 

Osamu had his plans in order and Rintarou had an end date, a time to pick up his shit and set himself in motion.

“You’re late.”

Instinctively, his lips curl into a smirk and he barely shrugs with one shoulder. 

“Oh, you know,” he replies flippantly while his stomach tries to tear at his heart, “important people are never on time.”

Osamu smiles and it reaches his eyes in a way that makes Rintarou want to puke. He couldn’t be more beautiful if he tried. Rintarou doesn’t have space for doubt, it might just shatter him.

“I close soon.”

“I know, I thought I could help.”

“I have staff for that.”

“Ohhh,” Rintarou says, sitting down now by the counter, in a fake falsetto voice, “look at me,” Osamu begins to swat him with a towel, “I’m Miya Osamu, brand new owner of Onigiri Miya and I have _staff_.”

Osamu laughs, giving up and tucking the towel back into the waistband of his apron.

It’s not that Rintarou hasn’t seen him lately, though the last few weeks have been hectic, but there’s something about the way he stands now that makes him look so much more than he ever did before. Or maybe it’s the occasion. Or maybe it’s just Rintarou.

He eats the food that’s placed in front of him, and he laughs at the jokes of the people that sit beside him, and he allows himself a moment to bask in this time between. Giddiness wells through him and something is caught in his throat.

There have only been two things that Rintarou has ever wanted from life and they were to be happy in his career, ideally as a volleyball player, and to have Osamu love him, and to love him back.

He has the first, and times toys with him as he waits for the second as people finally begin to peter out and the clock ticks too loudly and there’s something on Osamu’s chin. 

“You don’t have to wait—” Osamu begins rubbing his face against his shoulder.

“But I want to.”

Osamu smiles. Shutting the doors, he sends his staff home early and those words from three years and two months give or take a couple of weeks scratch at Rintarou’s mind.

“Can I see the kitchen?” He asks when the last person has left. 

“Of course.”

In a corner of the kitchen is a photograph, that’s slightly yellowed with age, of Miya Osamu being taught how to make onigiri for the first time in his life. He is small and fat with chubby, round cheeks and a head that looks like it could topple him over. His mouth and eyes are opened wide and it always makes Rintarou smile.

“You got exactly what you wanted,” he says it quietly, but Osamu is right beside him, bare arm skimming his own.

“Yeah,” Osamu replies, but Rintarou can’t look at him, “I guess I did. But so did you, big shot. I heard about the sponsorship.”

Rintarou snorts, they both know he couldn’t care less.

“Osamu,” Rintarou starts and looks over at him, maybe this is dangerous, maybe this is a mistake, maybe promises made in the dark by an eighteen year old drunk on a quarter final victory, shouldn’t be held like a sworn oath. Shouldn’t be immortalised and hung in the mind of the boy they were aimed at that was too scared to ever say anything himself. That maybe took the easy way out by letting it be the other’s responsibility. That feels like he could be sick all over the brand new linoleum floor. “Do you have something to tell me?”

He peers curiously at Rintarou, and then it breaks across his face—understanding.

Half a laugh and he’s running his hands through his now dark hair. “You heard that, huh?”

He could lie, pretend he meant something else.

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“Because,” Rintarou moves so they’re facing each other head on, “it wouldn’t have been fair. On either of us. I didn’t know that then but… I think I knew something.”

Osamu nods, and for one of the first times in his life since the day he met him, Rintarou cannot read him. It’s terrifying. 

“Well then,” he looks stern, “you already know what I’m going to say, so I don’t really need to say it, do I?”

Rintarou wants to kick him, wants to shove him, and mess his hair, and steal his food, and knock him down, and make him say it because he didn’t really tell him. He told a version of him that has since grown up, changed. And he has too. Can he or does he still love him, does the new version of Osamu love the new version of Rintarou?

“I think I’d still like to hear it.”

Osamu laughs—the one where he throws his head back lightly and his shoulders shake. Rintarou wants to grab it with his hands and carve it into his bones and wrap it around himself so tight he could cry.

“I love you Suna Rintarou, since I was eighteen years old, I love you.”

Rintaro takes his hand and then drops it in favour of cupping his face, rubbing the pads of his thumbs over the line of his cheekbones. He’s wanted to do this for so long. He’s wanted to hold him and look him in the eyes and tell him—

“I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to regan for giving this a read before I posted it and most specifically not judging me for working on the wrong fic......
> 
> [my twitter!](https://twitter.com/ohmiyamy/status/1349731218502270986?s=19)


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